


i'm a black ocean leaping and wide

by loosedindecember



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Madi having conversations with other women, Madi vs colonialism, Metaphors, Post-Canon, References to Slavery (no direct descriptions), not NOT Treasure Island compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27001153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosedindecember/pseuds/loosedindecember
Summary: “I am going to Jamaica,” she tells Long John Silver, pirate-killer and pirate king, “and I will have my war after all. And you are going to help me.”Madi gets her war, and a life beyond war, too.
Relationships: Madi/Eme - Relationship, Madi/John Silver
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26
Collections: Black Sails Rarepair Ficathon - Round 1





	i'm a black ocean leaping and wide

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou.
> 
> ETA: written to fill the prompt "madi/silver + reconciliation seems impossible" in the Black Sails Rarepair Ficathon!

i. _i feel, therefore i can be free_

“You know,” Eme says casually as they sit on the balcony, evening settling inky-blue and promising over the village, “I killed the white man who captured me. I could kill your captor, too.” Her eyes flick, deliberately, to the penumbral form of a man leaning over the rail of a hanging bridge, just out of earshot.

“Thank you,” Madi says carefully, handing Eme another slice of mango and trying not to choke, “but I think you know it is not the same.” 

Eme’s grin is as bright as it is swift. “Why does he stay here? Everyone knows what he did to you. What he took.”

Her hand shakes, so she sets the knife down. In her maudlin moments, she considers just how much he has taken from himself. Wonders if his presence on this island is not a kind of punishment. “Half of our people likely think it a blessing. That we narrowly avoided a war we had no hope of winning.”

“And the other half?”

Madi shrugs, and watches as Eme licks the mango juice from her fingers. The man on the bridge shifts. His outline is slowly disappearing into the deepening sky. 

“There are other wars,” Eme says, some time later. “Would you let him stop you again?”

* * *

Word has reached their island of a woman the Jamaican Maroons call Queen Nanny, a cunning strategist and assiduous warrior and, according to rumour, a practitioner of supernatural arts. She leaves planters and militiamen alike quaking at the mere invocation of her name. She and a man called Quao, a man they call her brother, lead a community of Maroons several hundred-strong in plantation raids and petty warfare against colonial forces in the eastern wildlands of the island. Kwame, one of her mother’s advisors who has an ear for gossip, has told Madi that Nanny’s Windward Maroons have freed hundreds of slaves.

“Madi,” her mother says on a sigh resigned but tender, “you have always known who you are.”

Madi presses their foreheads together. Her mother’s forehead is dark and strong and perpetual. “It is just like you, to cloak your advice in ambiguity.” 

Her mother hums warmly. “Perhaps I am unwilling to put to words the extraordinary task you have set yourself. How much I worry.”

“Maame—”

“No, listen to me.” Madi feels the strength in her mother’s fingers when they come up to cup her chin. “Even I can hear the whisper of change in the wind. As your leader, I have confidence in your abilities and am comfortable dedicating resources in support of your plan.” Her fingers tighten. “As your mother, I worry. You will understand this when you have children of your own. And, as your mother, I have never been prouder of you.” 

“Oh.” Madi blinks and a tear rolls free. “Oh, Maame.” 

Her mother’s hand slides to grip the nape of her neck. By this, her mother means: _your father would be proud, too_. Madi gasps a ragged syllable of grief.

“I’ll come back,” Madi says when she can swallow again. “This is not—I am not abdicating my responsibilities.”

“I believe I will be able to keep things from unraveling here until you are ready to return.” Her wry grin softens. “But do not stay away for too long at once.” 

“I won’t. A few months, perhaps. I must go where I am needed, and if I am needed here, then here is where I will be. But I hope Jamaica will be only the beginning. I hear of uprisings in Barbados, Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Antigua—”

“One at a time, me dɔfo,” her mother laughs. “The promise of change can be heady, and alluring. But do not let yourself be seduced by it such that you are distracted from your present task. Have patience, and be pragmatic.”

Madi listens carefully, gripping her mother’s hands as if by doing so she might absorb the instinct and skill and readiness that allows her mother to wear leadership like a second skin.

* * *

Madi knows where to find John when he is not lurking at the edges of her sight-lines: planted on that hill, eyes focused unblinking and raw on Nassau. She sometimes wonders if he is seeing not Nassau but Savannah.

She has barely crested the hill when he says, “Jamaica?”

The news has traveled quickly.

His hand curls and uncurls around the grip of his crutch. He will wait as long as he has to for her to speak.

“I hope you are not thinking of interfering this time.” 

She wonders immediately if she has taken the wrong approach. His head jerks around, a muscle jumps in his jaw.

“How can you—” He cuts himself off, huffing through his nose. He swivels to face her fully. “What do you want me to say?” he asks, the corner of his mouth curling in prelude to a sardonic smile.

Privately, she admits she does not know. She tries to straighten her posture, finds it already straight—not for the first time does she give silent thanks for her mother’s strictures—and exhales with control. “I did not come for you to say anything. I will not ask for a promise, because I could not be sure you would keep it.”

That inchoate smile on John’s face flickers and dies. “I understand,” he says after a long moment. “Perhaps it is foolish of me to hope—that in time, you might come to trust me again.” 

Madi remembers how it felt to touch John, to hold him, when he had come impossibly back to life. How it felt simply to look at him, how stealing a glance seemed like stealing pieces of him back for herself. How it felt to walk into a room with him in it and be blind to everything but him, vital and oversaturated with colour.

She also remembers how it felt to be betrayed by him. To realize that, for months, they had both been choosing to see versions of each other that did not exist. 

“I cannot build a future with a man who would sacrifice justice for a single life,” she says, her gaze dragging away from his. She wrenches it back. “A man with no respect for history, with no purpose or loyalty but to himself.”

“I am loyal to _you_ ,” he growls, and when he adds, “My God, Madi, I love you,” his body trembles, once, as though the words are a tangible weight knocking him unbalanced.

“Your love is selfish, John Silver,” she snaps. Forces herself to watch as his heart splinters in his eyes. For such an impenetrable man, his eyes are ruinously revealing. “Do you still not understand? My people have _always_ been at war, and will continue to be as long as slavery exists in the world. You did not understand, then, what it meant to me to be denied that war. To hide me away in safety while my people are stolen, shackled, worked to death, violated in every _possible_ way—” She feels close to wheezing, and gathers herself. “Until you come to understand this, there can never be anything between us but anger and regret.”

It is certainly torture, to know that she would have given his life for her people and it would not have broken her. Or it is torture to know that he knows this of her. Or to know that he would not do the same. 

“And if this kills you?” he asks, unable to mask the tremor in his voice.

“I will die knowing I did my part,” she replies calmly, nails biting into her palm. “That I helped to make the world better. That the fighting won’t stop when I am gone. And that I took as many British soldiers as I could with me.”

He watches her stiffly. “I see there is nothing I could say to dissuade you,” he says, in that slow, drawling way he has when he is orating, or when his mind is feverishly working to find that one golden thing it can exploit.

“No, there is not.”

Finally, he lifts his eyes from her, scanning the scrubby vegetation behind her and seeing she knows not what. His jaw works. He sighs, and still he says nothing.

“I am going to Jamaica,” she tells Long John Silver, pirate-killer and pirate king, “and I will have my war after all. And you are going to help me.”

She is furious with him still, 

(And yet she loves him still and she is furious about that, too)

but Madi did not become the woman she is today without learning to compartmentalize.

* * *

She is taking an indulgent moment to herself, filling her eyes with the tangled and glorious shore of her beloved island from the deck of her ship. John had procured it for her, and in the same breath assured her he would not be on it. She had selected her own crew. In a matter of weeks, John will take his own ship out to the deep sea, on the hunt for merchants sailing from the Gold Coast.

A flock of birds are taking off in joyous flight from treetops deep in the forest when John comes up beside her. Though they do not speak, she cannot call what is between them silence; she is far too conscious of the insistent nudge of waves against the hull, the ambient noises of the crew as they tend to the demands of the ship. The smell of the saltwater is so strong it coats her tongue.

“I will not be your Penelope,” she eventually tells him, and touches his hand to soften the sharp of her words.

He looks down, and she knows without seeing that his eyes are wet. “I would be yours, if you let me,” he replies.

 _Newton writes that each planet in the sky travels a fixed trajectory_ , she wants to tell him, _and that the forces that move them must be counterbalanced by their distance from that around which they revolve_. She wants to ask him, _Has the moon ever thought to kiss the earth? If it tried very hard, could it resist the very condition of its existence, even for the briefest of moments, just to know the joy of that perfect and anodyne and fatal collision?_ And she wants to ask him, _which of us is destined to orbit the other?_

She stands with him on the deck as her fingers slowly, inexorably drag back down to the rough damp grain of the rail.

* * *

ii. _i am a woman searching for her savagery / even if it’s doomed_

The journey to Jamaica is not one she makes alone. She imagines Kofi sober and solid at her side, at her back; her father, whose face she worked so feverishly those last weeks to memorize, lives in the shell of her ear and tells her to take what she’s learned and take up her gun and take her liberation.

Captain Flint is an infrequent shadow, a sour almost whose loss is embittered by wasted potential. So sudden, it had seemed, their final unraveling. She can do this without Flint. She _will_ do this without Flint.

Eme has agreed to join her; her smile from across the afterdeck drapes over Madi’s shoulders like a favourite shawl. 

And besides, she knows and trusts the men and women on this ship. Julius had watched, expression pinched, as Madi’s little army had swelled around her, but he hadn’t said a word. He had grasped her shoulder before walking away, and that was as close as she could expect to get to his approval. Those of his people who had chosen to come with her are her people, too. In Jamaica, they will find more people, help more people. Someday, and Madi knows it will be when she is long gone, they will extend their open hands beyond the West Indies. 

When she steps from ship to shore, she feels the pulse of her ancestors strong and vital in her throat. She is wild with the promise of revolution, she is ready, she will deliver hundreds, perhaps thousands, to their emancipation, and she will make England answer for the bones and bodies it gives as unwilling tribute to the Middle Passage. 

The first sound of an abeng brings tears of homesickness to her eyes. 

Fellowship comes easily in Nanny Town. Madi ends many of her days trading stories with other Maroons, mending clothes and sharpening blades by candlelight. Eme will not speak of her family, but she teaches them words in Kalanga, her mother tongue. Tinima, a Taíno woman at least two score years Madi’s senior and an unerring shot with a blunderbuss, tells a captive audience night after night, with the sleekness of a capable storyteller, of fantastical escapades, near misses, and rightful vengeance. 

Madi learns the cockpits of the Blue Mountains and touches the hands of every Windward Maroon in Nanny Town. She learns from her comrades how to paint herself invisible among the trees, how to slow her breathing to stillness, how to trip and trap their enemy. She learns how to use the terrain to her advantage, how to prevail in the wet and muck of the rainy season, how to plan an ambush and send her soldiers out and, sometimes, how to stop waiting for them to return. They stay one move ahead, stay just out of reach, run nimble through treacherous overgrowth and spring traps and appear from between the trees like wraiths. Madi’s belt is hung with knives, and each of them has tasted British blood. 

When she returns from her first plantation raid Madi is blood-drenched and ravenous. Eme, on watch tonight for errant Redcoats, welcomes them all with an eloquent nod. The refugees—Adwoa and her father Bodua; Yaa and Amma, sisters; the elderly Jenny, shrewd eyes already counting heads; so many more whose names Madi will learn—are hurt and grateful and angry and wary as they are shown to new lodgings, heaped with food and furs. 

In the small room she shares with Eme, Madi sucks down two bowls of goat stew and shakes apart thinking about the overseer whose skull her bullet had torn open, about Nassau and Ruth and how she felt herself possessed by Flint’s controlled, economical ferocity tonight. How she felt steadied by his presence.

When she has calmed, she shakes apart against Eme’s fingers and tongue, and she has never felt more protected. 

Later, as she is combing Eme's hair, Eme asks, “How many?”

“Hmm?” Madi grunts, tongue tucked between her teeth. She grows more alert when Eme raps at her knee playfully. “How many what?”

“How many slaves did you free tonight?”

The gentle rasp of the comb through Eme's short hair; the slender moan that slips from her throat. The fragrant and heady scent of the oil she is using to smooth the way. The mellow chirruping of countless nocturnal creatures. 

“One hundred and thirty-two.”

Madi itches from the silence as she finishes her work. Eme turns on her knees, and Madi lays her hands, finger by finger with intent, over the apples of Eme’s cheeks. “I feel strange,” she whispers into the sacred space between them.

“You are tired,” Eme whispers back, eyes sparkling.

Madi taps at her cheekbone. “Tonight I killed a man because he tried to stop me, and though I take no joy from it, I do take satisfaction in knowing there is one less slaver in the world, and that I made it so.”

Eme kisses her, and draws her down to the pillow. Madi coaxes the blanket from underneath them and tucks it around them both.

“What are you thinking of?” Eme asks.

“I am thinking that I would have killed a hundred men with my bare hands, gladly, if it meant freeing even half the number we did tonight.”

“My brave warrior,” Eme murmurs drowsily, her hand drifting feather-light to cup the pit of Madi’s knee. “I cannot find it within me to be repelled by that. So what does that make us?” 

Madi slips into sleep between one breath and the next.

* * *

John seems to possess a preternatural ability to sense, even from an ocean away, when she has returned home for a time. When John next blows into the bay of Maroon Island, smelling of salt and ocean tang, he tells her with a tremulous sort of pride of the tales spread by British officers of rainforests populated by living trees, of Queen Nanny plucking bullets from the air, and of the brutal and warlike Maroons. Every port in the West Indies at which he makes berth, he says, shivers with these hushed and awed mutterings. She knows without him telling her that he feeds these hungering legends, plants and nurtures mutterings of his own.

He also does not need to tell her of the slave ships he has taken and left blazing to the waterline. She knows of these, too. He is trying to understand her, earnestly and doggedly.

When John comes to her, she allows him into her bed, half resentful and half relieved. His mouth at her breast, his mouth between her thighs, his mouth on her mouth: he drinks her down and prolongs her pleasure to the edge of pain. Her eyes never close when they are like this, entwined and perspiring. She must not forget herself or the truth of him. The scrape of his teeth on her throat is so reverent it seems to expose his vulnerability more than hers. He scorches above her, against her, inside her; she can hardly look at him he is so beautiful, but she grits her teeth to stop her eyes fluttering shut and remembers and remembers.

He never apologizes, not with words, for which she is grateful. And when he leaves, ship laden with refugees and crates of food and arms, the fight grinding on, she never tells him goodbye. By this, she means: _I will see you soon_.

* * *

It is many years and sacrifices later when Madi feels fatigue coming home to roost. It huddles somewhere inside her ribcage and she knows, instinctively, that it will never be expelled.

Between one day and the next, Nanny Town has stopped existing.

Madi learns of this blow at her mother’s sickbed. She has been home this last fortnight to supervise her mother’s convalescence—had set sail immediately after reading Julius’ letter and returned home to find her mother weak but recuperating—and is attempting, futilely, to convince the wilful woman to stay abed when Eme clatters in.

“What is it?” Madi asks sharply. Eme has never deliberately clattered in all the years she has known her. 

“It’s Kwame,” she pants, “he just returned from Nassau, he says it’s all anyone can talk about: the British have destroyed Nanny Town.”

“Oh, fuck,” Madi says, and drops a bowl of water.

Her mother sucks her teeth in disapproval.

“It’s gone, all of it,” Eme tells them, slowly as if she is only now beginning to understand.

“Survivors?” Madi’s mother asks.

Eme throws up her hands. “I have not heard.” 

“Who else knows?” Madi asks.

“Knowing Kwame? Half the village, by now.”

“Eme,” her mother says, wincing as she props herself higher against her pillows, “I wonder if you might fetch the physician for me. My head is pounding.”

As Eme goes, Madi gives her the look that means _we’ll talk later_.

“Now, tell me what is on your mind.”

Water is seeping into her shoe, and Nanny Town is gone. Madi looks helplessly at her mother.

“I am very sorry, Madi,” her mother says, brow furrowed.“Often, in my life, I have tried to make sense of the senseless,” she muses. “I have endured many senseless things, marked them and mourned their casualties. Of course, I have come to realize that though they might appear senseless, these things do not exist in a place beyond logic or reason.”

“What are you saying?” Madi asks wearily, tasting only ash and smoke.

“It comes down to power. Men can be led to do terrible things in order to obtain and to preserve it. And, I suppose, it also comes down to fear. Men fear that which is unfamiliar, that which they do not understand.” A smile flits over her mouth. “I am saying that the British position is insecure and they are becoming desperate and aggressive.”

“They are not the only ones,” Madi mutters.

“Ah,” her mother sighs, eyes softening. “This is not the first time you have encountered an obstacle, Madi. Your grief, your anger—you must feel it thoroughly. But I worry that your conviction will make you… inflexible.

“There is more than one way to win a war,” her mother says. Even sweat-shiny and swaddled in blankets, she is regal and authoritative. “You have such ideals, me dɔfo, and you are uncompromising in your dedication to them. But to lead your people through a war, you must be willing to compromise. Learn this: get strong. Push forward. Get pushed back, and sometimes, negotiate to keep the position. But get stronger, and stronger, and push forward, and forward. Do you see?”

“Sacrifice the battle,” Madi translates, “to win the war.”

Her mother smiles, the way she had when Madi was a child and had solved a difficult puzzle. “Something like that.”

Leaving her mother to her rest, Madi slinks from the village, eager for time alone. Her feet draw her down a path well-worn by no one but her, carved into her muscle memory; at its end lies a copse of trees virtually indistinguishable from those populating the rest of the forest. Madi liked to imagine as a child that these trees were rooted deepest of any on the island, that their bark was tougher than any axe, such that no act of God or weather or man could fell them. She would climb high into the lush canopy and rub the sap between her fingers, delighting in the texture. She had dozed cradled by the arms of these trees, her island spread out around and beneath her a verdant and gilded and unceasing kingdom.

The last time she had climbed these trees, her old and ancient friends, had been on the eve of their victory over Hornigold’s men. She laughs, now, to recall that time as being simpler, but in many ways it was. She and John were still discovering each other (and had not yet arrived at the terrible discoveries); Flint was an untested and volatile variable, but no less compelling; her mother’s isolationism was bending; she was finally beginning to enact her purpose.

Madi does not frequently indulge in yearning backward. Yearning forward, she has found, is more productive and less likely to dredge up bitterness.

She strokes the pitted bark of her favourite climbing tree, and limb by limb pulls herself up until she can once again see out past the dew-hazy trees to the unfurling ocean beyond. She wants to reach out, all the way across Cuba and the Caribbean, and smite the planters and militiamen of Jamaica and sow their earth with salt. She wants, so badly her stomach hurts with it, to gather up all of her comrades, the slaves and labourers, everyone she has not met but loves anyway, and deliver to them an island gloriously, uncompromisingly unyoked.

John is not here, and she furtively allows herself ten seconds in which to miss him. To make up for it, she revisits an old argument with him in her head.

John would say: _Why try to change the world when you won’t be there to see any of it? When it can only end in your pointless death and no reversal of the_ status quo _?_

And she would reply: _I am planting a garden, and watering it with the love and blood of my ancestors, so that my children and their children and all the children of my people might taste and share in freedom._

After a brooding dinner, Madi’s mother takes her hand. “You ought to stay for a time—at least until you get word about the situation. What you would be going back to.” _If anything._

Madi swallows down the sour taste in her mouth. Tonight, she feels too weak to argue.

She stays home for another interminable fortnight before returning to Jamaica. She pays her respects to Nanny Town, already seeping back into the forest, and lays a curse on all those who seek it who do not belong. She lets Nanny Town rest. She gets back to work. Nanny and Quao rebuild their resistance with grim, relentless tenacity.

The war moils on.

* * *

Madi returns home when she is able. Her mother’s illness has reminded her that though she has commitments, roots in the bloody and thriving soil of Jamaica, it is not where her roots reach deepest. She ferries the women, children, and men seeking shelter to Maroon Island; some remain there, growing roots of their own, and some go to sea, and others join John’s crew and sail to Madagascar and Sierra Leone, stalk the African coast.

She is always pulled back to Jamaica. She debates strategy long into the night with Nanny and Quao as often as she joins her men on the front lines. Skirmishes with bands of Redcoats leave her grimy and euphoric for a matter of hours; plantation raids and revolts, when they pull them off, fill her with a satisfaction much more substantive.

“There are so many of us,” Madi whispers to her father. It is the darkest hour of the night and Eme sleeps soundly beside her. “More every day.”

* * *

Six years after they lose Nanny Town, fatigue has finished colonizing her ribcage and has begun to invade her throat. 

War against the planters and the militiamen is constant; chaotic and pitched and spontaneous and desperate and disunified. Nanny and Quao are clever and capable tacticians, but the reality remains that they are a few hundred people on a small island among scores of small islands covered in endless fields of sugarcane and overrun by men who wish them bound. The eternal impasse between British and Maroon forces has become a chasm into which they have been steadily feeding coin and lives for years upon years.

The British send a representative to negotiate terms for peace. In exchange for five hundred acres of land and supervised self-government, the British demand military support from the Maroons in case of external aggression. Worse: they insist upon assistance in capturing runaway slaves. Worst: Quao agrees.

There is little reason to stay in Jamaica when its resistance has been so defanged, not when there are countless other nascent rebellions to stoke. Madi can acknowledge this, if only dimly in the back of her mind. A dull spark sizzles and coughs in her belly, but the low hum of resentment among the Windward Maroons keeps it from going out. Tinima, in a rare somber humour, holds Madi tightly. Nanny, brittle, tight-lipped and eyes roiling, clasps Madi’s arm and if she were pale like John she would find five purple fingerprints there like a loud but horribly transient brand, proof that she was here, that she was _in this_ , that it could not possibly have been for nothing—

proof that they had done everything they could, that the sacrifices were sacrifices and not pointless losses, that they had helped and saved people so many people women and children and men all alive free to _be_ alive with abandon with fucking _impunity_ and why the fuck

_why_

and will it be like this every time?

The journey home takes no longer than it typically does; the winds are good and the waves barely turbulent; Madi presses her fingers over and over into her arm to keep the bruises from fading.

Neither her mother nor Julius appear when their spindly village comes into view, for which Madi is glad. One glance at either might provoke tears, which Madi finds unacceptable in public. She attempts to arrange her features into an expression approximating serenity in case anyone lingers to mark her arrival.

Alone, Madi considers the pace and price of progress. If you give the British an inch they will take a mile and take your town and make a mockery of freedom and ask why you do not thank them. She thinks she cannot possibly live by her mother’s advice without losing a part of herself. She thinks, a small and grudging amount, about Woodes Rogers. About how quickly the space between years, and the battles and victories filling that space, can be made to vanish.

She is lucky that Eme finds her before she can slouch too deep into the bottle of rum she has found among John’s effects.

“I know, love,” Eme murmurs when all Madi can do is produce a sound like an injured bird. “Come here, now.”

She intends only to let Eme pet her hair for a few minutes, until she can relearn to breathe around the rage clogging her throat, but when Eme begins to hum softly, the vibrations soothe her to sleep in an instant.

It is still day when she wakes, and Eme’s long fingers are still moving over her hair. 

“Would you like to talk about it?” Eme asks.

Madi blows out a thick breath. Her voice is rough like sandpaper. “I only—I must be careful not to be too bitter. It is surely a blow for the British, to surrender so much land and to promise freedom in governing it.”

“But…”

“But what are we truly fighting for? Freedom from empire, or status within it? Legitimacy, or subordination by another name? What kind of choice is that? Both possibilities lead to the same outcome: our people, and those like us, firmly under the thumb of the British empire. That cannot be all that is open to us.”

“Oh, Madi,” Eme laughs. “Please do not take this poorly, but sometimes you sound just like him, with his big dramatic speeches!”

“Ah! You wretch, take that back!”

Eme gives a good struggle, but it does not take Madi long to wrestle her to the floor. Eme gasping with delight and laughter, skin smooth and so warm, those beautiful new creases bracketing her eyes: this feeds Madi better than rage ever could.

Madi’s smile slips. She shifts so that she can lay down next to Eme, aware of her shoulder, her arm, her hand, her thigh, her knee: all the points at which they connect. “I wonder sometimes if my mother wasn’t right all along.”

“You would not be you if you hid all your life,” Eme replies. She has done this, read Madi’s meaning in the words she has omitted, so many times that it comes no longer as a shock but as a pleasant sort of pinch in her chest. “But there can be courage in retreat. It is also revolutionary for displaced people to make a home.”

“I’m so afraid,” Madi confesses. “What if it was for nothing? What if they stay always right behind us, unraveling every stitch we make? What if, in the end, everything we have done, everything we have given, has made no difference?” 

Oh, just listen to her. This will teach her never to drink John’s rum ever again.

Eme sighs, then flicks her between the eyes.

“Thank you for that.”

“‘In the end,’” Eme says thoughtfully.

“Hmm?”

“You said, ‘in the end.’ What if nothing we did comes to matter then. Is it not enough for our actions to matter in the present moment? Or in ten, or twenty years from now?”

Madi arranges her words with care. “I know that the perpetuation of this community and the wellbeing of our people is more important than this particular war of attrition with the British. I know the struggle will continue in Jamaica in spite of the treaty. But I do not know how much longer I can bear to be a soldier while the British continue to dictate the terms.” She folds her hands together over her chest. “And neither do I know if I can bear to step away.”

Eme hums in thought. The silence creaks and settles. Then: 

“How many?”

This, too, Eme has done many times. It is a good trick.

“Eight hundred. Maybe more.”

“Mm.” Eme smiles. “Eight hundred or more people whose lives belong fully to themselves, people whose futures are wide open. People who want the same things we want. Five hundred acres of land is just the beginning. How many generations of free people will that land sustain? We did that, Madi, all of us.” Eme’s voice trembles with pride and steel. “And you and I… I believe we are of the same mind. We will keep the fight, won’t we?”

They are not the only ones. Not on this island, not in the West Indies, not in the world. Madi knows well that a future free of oppression is not within her lifetime; but others will fight when she can no longer, and still others will fight when they cannot. And they _will_ be remembered.

Madi inhales, and the polyphonic scents of frying fish and goat, plantains and okra and taro root, suffuse her and remind her that there is someone in every house on this island. Friends, and lovers, and families in the thousands are cooking for and with each other and would gladly offer a stranger a seat at their table. Sometimes she forgets that sharing a meal, sharing stories, growing a garden, loving and fucking—these things are for more than base survival. Madi’s war must be for these things, the ability to do them over and over again, and with joy, and with care, and without fear, until they are no longer little rebellions. 

There has to be living, to make the war worth it.

Madi takes Eme’s hand and squeezes it tightly and feels her ribcage expanding, and brings herself up onto her elbow so she can lean over to Eme, who is rising to meet her.

In a few hours, she will go out to meet John when she hears him ascending the stairs. She will know it to be him, even though his ship is not expected to arrive so soon, because his hesitating and uneven steps are as familiar to her as the elegiac call of the mourning dove. Perhaps she will rush, a little, for he will have only reached the penultimate step and his brows will jump in surprise when he looks up to her.

She will like the sight of John Silver and his hoping, horizon eyes looking up to her.

(She has not yet forgiven him; she may never forgive him. But perhaps, all this time, he has not been punishing but rather proving himself. Perhaps, when he puts himself in her hands, it is not out of atonement, but out of faith.

 _What are you for?_ she had once screamed. _What made you this way?_

He had not replied, but she had known his answer as clearly as though he had whispered it in her ear: _I am for you, always._ If she were to ask him the same question now, she knows it would be infinitesimally, but not immaterially, different. As much as John Silver might burn to, he cannot shed his skin any more than he can reinvent that which is underneath it. He would say: _I am for you, always, so use me as your weapon._ )

“You’re home early,” she will say with love-clumsy lips, and hold out her hand.

* * *

iii. _filled to the very living_

Her father says, _Wage war on the world_.

When will it be enough?

Her mother says, _I am growing old_.

When will she have done enough to justify doing no more?

Eme says, _See how our garden has grown?_

She is tired. She is not broken, never broken, but she aches. Does England feel her presence? Does it shake at the thought of her?

John says, _I will be waiting when you are ready_.

Just a little bit longer. Then it will be time to tend her own plot.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all who read this! 
> 
> Section titles:
> 
> i. “Poetry is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde  
> ii. “Poem for Nana” by June Jordan  
> iii. “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer” by June Jordan
> 
> I'm loosedindecember on tumblr :)


End file.
